Queens College SIS Research in Praxis Discussion Series

When: Apr 21, 2026 05:30 PM  in  Eastern Time (US and Canada), on Zoom

*Classes follow a Thursday Schedule according to Queens College Calendar on that day (Tuesday, April 21).

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Title: In Search of Information Autonomy: Grassroots Recordkeeping Practices in a Hyper-Connected World

This research identifies and describes a set of information practices we call "grassroots recordkeeping", which are done by extra-institutional groups such as community archives, organizers and activist groups, fan communities, and neighborhood support organizations, as a part of their self-governance and social practices. These behaviors are driven by a desire to move away from cloud-based and other born-linked forms of information storage, which we characterize as a desire for "information autonomy." In practice, this looks like the implementation of privacy-forward applications and data services, the divestment of community materials from cloud services such as Google and AWS, and a move towards locally-hosted servers and hard drives, and potentially towards non-digital forms of communication and information sharing amongst group members. We identify a need for skills which support these practices, and which address the privacy, security, and ownership concerns of these groups and we also assert that digital privacy might be more productively reframed from an information autonomy perspective in the case of groups doing grassroots recordkeeping work.

About the Speaker:

Dr. S.E. “Shack” Hackney is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY. His research examines the intersections of librarianship and computing with regards to digital text and information processing, and he does extensive work with community groups around information privacy and surveillance. His teaching and pedagogical practice focuses on the ethics of information work, and the shifting relationships between workers, institutions, and the communities they serve.

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